Hillary May Have Hyped, But She Wasn't Wrong

CLARENCE PAGE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

January 24, 2006|CLARENCE PAGE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

If you're a sensitive sort, put in your ear plugs. The brutal ugliness of presidential campaign politics has already begun, judging by the manufactured indignation that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's critics are kicking up over her "plantation" crack.

In case you have not heard, the New York Democrat and, lest we forget, former first lady, rallied a mostly black crowd in a Harlem church on Martin Luther King Day by saying the House of Representatives "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about."

For this, Hillary's been getting hammered with brickbats on the right ("I think it's ridiculous -- it's a ridiculous comment," said Laura Bush) and even a few tut-tut's from the left ("What it tells us is not about race, but about Hillary's tin ear and her lack of awareness of it," writes neo-blogger Arianna Huffington.)

I, for one, wondered what's the big deal. "Plantation politics" is an old metaphor in black community politics. A Dec. 13, 1987, Chicago Tribune profile traced the phrase to a speech political consultant Don Rose wrote in 1966 for then-Alderman Timuel Black's crusade against the Democratic machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley. It later became a rallying cry in Harold Washington's successful 1983 campaign to become the city's first black mayor.

Whether young Hillary Rodham, a native of Chicago's suburbs, picked up the metaphor there, I do not know. But, there's no denying the word has special power among African-Americans. As Emory University theology professor Robert Franklin said, the word is "shorthand for an immoral concentration of resources, exclusion and the arrogance of a company's unchecked power."

Or a legislature's unchecked power. After all, Newt Gingrich made the same comparison in 1994, just before he became speaker of the House: "Since they think it is their job to run the plantation," he said of the Democrats who controlled the House, "it shocks them that I'm actually willing to lead the slave rebellion."

My conservative blog-writing friend Robert A. George, a former Newt aide who describes himself as a "Catholic, West Indian black Republican," defends his former boss, saying the "context" was different. "He was not speaking to a black audience," George writes, "or even obliquely referring to one; there was not an implicit racial connotation to his words."

Oh? So, it's OK to talk about plantations as long as it is not to a black audience?

Significantly, the backlash against Clinton's plantation talk comes at a time when quite a few conservatives have appropriated the word, particularly to attack blacks who stay on the "liberal plantation."

To his credit, my friend Robert wants both sides to drop the plantation talk. You don't win new friends by calling them plantation slaves, he points out. True enough. Besides, anyone running for president should know that the sensibilities of moderate swing voters nationwide are not as battle-hardened as they are in Chicago, the city that coined the phrase "politics ain't beanbag."

Or maybe there's something else at work here. Maybe it's not what Hillary Clinton said that mattered as much as who said it. She might have hyped her hyperbole a bit, but anybody who says she was wrong hasn't been paying attention.

Take the night of Dec. 21, for example, when Vice President Dick Cheney flew halfway around the world to cast the deciding vote on a budget that took health care and nursing home care away from as many as 100,000 people whose income was below the poverty line. It also saddled low-income college kids with extra debt. And it took away $5 billion to help states track down deadbeat dads. Estimated loss in child support to kids: $8 billion.

These cuts and more were made in order to alleviate some of the deficit caused by tax cuts for those of us who are fortunate enough to be in the upper income brackets. Meanwhile, Democrats could only complain about how little open debate the mammoth bill received before its late-night rush to passage.

Newt Gingrich had it right. Plantation masters should not be surprised to see a rebellion.